Data journalism produced by two of the nation’s most prestigious news organizations — The New York Times and The Washington Post — has lacked transparency, often failing to explain the methods journalists or others used to collect or analyze the data on which the articles were based, a new study finds. In addition, the news outlets usually did not provide the public with access to that data

While this is a worthwhile topic, I would like to see more exploration of data journalism in the 99.99999 percent of news organizations that are NOT the New York Times or the Washington Post and don't have the resources to publish so many data stories despite the desperate need for them across the nation. Also, why no digital news outlets included?

Worse yet, it wouldn’t
surprise me if we saw more unethical people publish data as a strategic
communication tool, because they know people tend to believe numbers more than
personal stories. That’s why it’s so important to have that training on
information literacy and methodology.”

Like the way unethical people use statistics in general? This should be a concern, especially as government data, long considered the gold standard of data, undergoes attacks that would skew the data toward political ends. (see the census 2020)

However, a healthy news ecosystem doesn’t just require a thriving free press, it also needs a diversity of curators, newsletters and content discovery options that enable the weird and wonderful to surface. We want to use Nuzzel as a test kitchen to see what models works for curators as well as content creators. The simple goal is a sustainable open web where the goals of creators, curators and consumers are aligned around the best possible experience.

This sounds exciting to me and could dovetail with efforts of many with respect to IndieWeb for Journalism.

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2019 is the year when publishers — whether big ones like Axios or the Los Angeles Times or tiny ones like mine or Judd Legum’s Popular Information — move away from letting someone else call all the shots. Or, at least, they should.

The BBC has a duty to 'inform' but absolutely no obligation to reflect widespread but evidence-free opinions about MMR vaccines, global warming, fake moon landings, 911 inside jobs, or Obama's birth certificate. The natural and logical corollary to this duty to inform is an obligation to fight misinformation.

And what bigger story could there be this year - where is the duty to inform is most pressing - than the subversion of democracy by overspending, illegal coordination and potential foreign funding of the most important constitutional vote in our lifetimes?

. . .

This constant political pressure makes the corporation risk-averse, and probably even more so with a subject like Brexit which begs big questions about the future of the country and its national security. Because of its hierarchical structure and special funding, there is a constant danger that senior BBC execs see their political masters as their most important customers rather than the license-fee paying public.

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He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists. "Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional."

This is a rough sketch of something I've been thinking that newspapers and media outlets should have been doing all along. If they "owned" social media, we might all be in a better place socially and journalistic-ally than if advertising driven social media owned it all.

Regular readers of Gillmor's eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. "One of the things I'm sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do," he says. "To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool."
One fascinating aspect of Gillmor's Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. "There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, 'I'm working on the following and here's what I think I know,' and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I'm on the right track, I'm wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces," he says. "That's a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog."

Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.

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Today’s leading-edge content tools are integrated context, collaboration and insight machines. We’re moving from unidirectional publishing of articles to organizing all our work and closing the feedback loop with our customers. I call this “full-stack publishing”.

This sounds a little bit like what the IndieWeb is building for itself!

Among the many phenomena we’d tentatively attribute, in large part, to the trend: the rise of sharebait (nee clickbait) and the general BuzzFeedification of traditional media; the Internet hoax-industrial complex, which only seems to be growing stronger; and the utter lack of intelligent online discourse around any remotely complicated, controversial topic.

Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.”

But on the Web, stories of all kinds can show up anywhere and information and news are all mixed together. Light features rotate through prominent spots on the "page" with the same weight as breaking news, sports coverage, and investigative pieces, even on mainstream news sites. Advertorial "features" and opinion pieces are not always clearly identified in digitalspaces.

This difference is one of the things I miss about reading a particular newspaper and experiencing the outlet's particular curation of their own stories.Perhaps I should spend more time looking at the "front page" of various news sites.

I'm curious to know which sources in particular they're using on these platforms. Snapchat was growing news sources a year ago, but I've heard those sources are declining. What is the general quality of these sources?

For example, getting news from television can range from PBS News Hour and cable news networks (more traditional sources) to comedy shows like Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah which have some underlying news in the comedy, but are far from traditional sources.

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Anyone can open up Twitter and instantly know what the world is gabbing about from minute to minute, all day long, across thousands of electronic sources that are instantly available all over the globe.

But we don't get the journalistic criticism of the coverage, who's doing it better, who's more thorough, etc. We're still missing that.

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Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers. It dumbs-down the content, which turns off your real audience, which ultimately makes you less valuable to advertisers. If you want to know why there’s so much remnant advertising on online news sites, it’s because you’re treating the stories like remnants already.

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recording it all in a Twitter thread that went viral and garnered the hashtag #PlaneBae.

I find it interesting that The Atlantic files this story with a URL that includes "/entertainment/" in it's path. Culture, certainly, but how are three seemingly random people's lives meant to be classified by such a journalistic source as "entertainment?"

“Nobody at Arenanet is safe from the hand of Reddit. We’re literally running the company now, they’re in fear of the very users they seek to consort with ... The moment a dev steps out of line or try to talk back to a player, guess what, they’ll know we got their hands on their throat and we can squeeze any time we like.”

The post that is cited here is a troll. It is obvious from the text, but the user later on admitted it as well.

Reporting, and therefore repeating, Trump’s tweets just gives him more power. There is an alternative. Report the true frames that he is trying to pre-empt. Report the truth that he is trying to divert attention from. Put the blame where it belongs. Bust the trial balloon. Report what the strategies are trying to hide.

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Perhaps I'm missing it, but is this not an open browser extension already? I'd love to have these pieces built as a WordPress or separate plugin. I've seen some of the pieces earlier today that look like they've been unbundled, but I'd love to have the rest...

the event in Miami on Inauguration Day (site:www.sourcewatch.com OR site:www.factcheck.org OR site:hoax-slayer.com OR site:www.truthorfiction.com OR site:opensecrets.org OR site:www.politifact.com OR site:snopes.com OR site:www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/ OR site:digipo.io)

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Sally Lehrman, senior director of the journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, leads its signature Trust Project, a complex international collaboration that she began building in 2015 to strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability and transparency.

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you can then use “Sign In with Google” to access the publisher’s products, but Google does the billing, keeps your payment method secure, and makes it easy for you to manage your subscriptions all in one place.

I immediately wonder who owns my related subscription data? Is the publisher only seeing me as a lumped Google proxy or do they get may name, email address, credit card information, and other details?

How will publishers be able (or not) to contact me? What effect will this have on potential customer retention?

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He believes it’s far more valuable to practice old-school journalism by sending a reporter to a county board meeting than to try to mine data from a government website.

The gathering, sifting, and reformulation of what's said at that meeting, and what's written in supporting documents connected to that meeting, is a workflow that can be massively improved in ways that have nothing to do with data journalism.

This shouldn't be an either/or scenario, either a "data-driven" reporter of the future or an "analog" luddite who processes the board meeting. These are complementary workflows, ideally supported by task-appropriate digital tools.

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Learn more. Often, writers lack self-confidence because deep down, they realize there’s something they don’t know. And they’re trying to fake it without that knowledge. It could be how to write in blog format, or how to get really great quotes from sources, or how to write strong query letters. If you sense your nervousness stems from a knowledge gap, fill it.

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Indeed, part of what sets Coates apart from other journalists or public intellectuals is that he tells his audience that historians’ works need to be consulted if they want to understand American history. Like any good high-school math student, Coates shows his work, illustrating which history books lead him to his conclusions.

This would seem like a no brainer to me. We should demand it of journalists and public intellectuals.

[...] ‘[O]nce we acknowledge the social construction of
news, why should we then reject alternative journalism simply because it is not
subject to the same normative and epistemological limits of mainstream
journalism?’

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Their path to that goal just looks—well, sounds—a bit different. It’s less a reinvention of the wheel, more a technological advancement. “The successful long-form print piece, the successful television documentary, the successful podcast will all be built around storytelling and narratives of people who are affected by what’s being investigated,” says Stephen Smith, executive editor and host of APM Reports.

The medium will change, the basics of journalism and storytelling have not. Now all we need is CNN to do more storytelling and use AJ+ for some source material.

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First, FOIA provided accessible tools to put abstract ideas into practice. Everyday citizens started to attach various political notions to these activities. Second, information flowed into a journalistic ecosystem that was prepared to process and interpret it for everyday citizens. Information obtained through FOIA was being interpreted in stories that changed public opinion (Leff etal., 1986). Third, ability for individuals to request information led to alternate uses for activ-ists, public interest groups, and non-profit organizations.

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Haberman is in Trump’s head so
deep she could be his psychiatrist, and she has had extraordinary access
to the president and the administration. She is a regular commentator on
TV about life “inside the castle.”

This is absolutely incredible and profound. As an old school wannabee journalist, I applaud these efforts. If only the Charlotte Observer would lower their prices to about $5 a month for digital, I would subscribe, even on my income.

50,000 documents from a financial services provider in Malta – emails, contracts, documents, invoices – were leaked some months ago to the German magazine Der Spiegel. Together with an Excel file listing 53,247 Malta companies and their shareholders, leaked to the news magazine portal The Black Sea last September, they have become The Malta Files.

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Did the writer engage with anyone who disagrees? Did they call a senator whose legislation bugs them? Did they try to grasp what the president-elect was doing, or merely repeat one of his more outrageous statements? If it's a broadcast interview, was the guest presented with genuine opposing views and challenged to answer? Those who wrestle with opposing arguments do you a service and often improve their own arguments.

This is a double-edged sword in traditional media - the need to get both sides of the argument. It is important for balanced and factual reporting, but it can also be problematic as it frames both sides as having equal importance in an issue. Think of the debate about climate change. In the name of journalistic fairness, a mainstream reporter may often feel obliged to get the opinion of a climate change denier to balance the story. This often gives the impression that the deniers are of equal weight on the issue. Could lead the general public to believe that climate change is a devisive issue since there are 2 sides, despite the fact that 99% of the science and research is weighted towards climate change. Should both sides be given equal weight in journalism? Could this actually help to create an environment of skepticism about facts? Making all facts seem debatable?

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The furore over Fake News is really about the seizures caused by overactivity in these synapses - confabulation and hallucination in the global brain of mutual media. With popularity always following a power law, runaway memetic outbreaks can become endemic, especially when the platform is doing what it can to accelerate them without any sense of their context or meaning.

One might think that Facebook could easily analyze the things within their network that are getting above average reach and filter out or tamp down the network effects of the most damaging things which in the long run I suspect are going to damage their network overall.

However, this is a distraction from the larger issue that the structure and the economics of social platforms incentivize the spread of low-quality content over high-quality material. Journalism with high civic value—journalism that investigates power, or reaches underserved and local communities—is discriminated against by a system that favors scale and shareability.

Some publishers are seeing a “Trump Bump” with subscriptions and donations rising post-election, and there is evidence of renewed efforts of both large and niche publishers to build audiences and revenue streams away from the intermediary platform businesses. However, it is too soon to tell if this represents a systemic change rather than a cyclical ripple.

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Jay Rosen on the challenges journalists face under Trump, and several suggested countermeasures. An important one is making direct connections with common people and listening to their concerns, which will help build trust.

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never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

"Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

Fact-based journalism now competes with false information for our attention while our cities and citizens become both more connected by technology and more divided by ideology and income. The values reflected in lines of code, whether it be at the ATM, when we search on internet or drive a car, are already affecting what we think, what we do and what information we share with those around us.

News media covered the emails like a breaking scandal, while giving little attention to how and why the emails were stolen.

Before that, Republicans made as much noise as they could about Benghazi, and Clinton using a private email server. News media could hardly have been more helpful to them if they were all owned outright by the Republican party.

News media treated Trump like a serious candidate, rather than the lying, idiot lowlife that he is.

Days before election day, James Comey announces, maybe possibly kind of, more emails from Clinton's private server discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. News media covers it enthusiastically. In a few days, Comey announces there was nothing new. How about that.

Dave Pell's main point here is that news media wouldn't produce crap if people didn't eat it up.

But we aren't all eating the crap. I don't think there's much we can do about the people who do. Many of them aren't being fooled by the lies and sensationalism. They're just choosing to "believe" what they want to "believe". (Though the number actually fooled was probably far more than enough to win the election for Trump.)

We need to give as much support as we can to responsible journalism and commentary. And maybe we can collectively discourage media from producing crap by making sure they know that millions of us are angered by it. Maybe there should be independent journalists as a branch of government, tasked with choosing what the people should know, and granted privileges similar to those that members of Congress have.

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Dave Pell points out that Trump's "grab her by the pussy" video was the big news on 7 October -- the same day the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence acknowledged that Russia was responsible for the DNC hacks. The latter should have been the main story that day, but it wasn't.

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http://digipo.io/doku.php<br>
The Digital Polarization Initiative<br>
"The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison

...

First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.

It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.

...

The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

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The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.

I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?

But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”

The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.

The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.

America is in great danger. Not just potential, but already upon us. And most of the media (especially television) is acting like nothing unusual has happened.

Imagine a category-five hurricane was bearing down on the East Coast with a 30 percent chance of making landfall, but the evening news treated it as a remote threat. Then imagine the forecast changed to 100 percent. Then imagine the news sent a reporter and cameraman to the coast for a beachfront live shot, with the storm just over the horizon. Then imagine that they devoted their airtime to commenting on the beauty of the ocean and the talent of the surfers.

That is basically what has happened over the course of the past week, except that the hurricane is Donald Trump’s presidency, and the East Coast is all of us—America and the world.

I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy.

This is something important to consider especially since I teach journalism. By default students need to learn how to deal with public comments. We try to ease into this arena of writing in a public space and avoiding controversy.

“Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

...

“I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”

“Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”

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In theory the editorial writers speak for the publisher. In practice the publisher does not routinely tell them what to say or even see their copy in advance. In this case I have on good authority that neither the publisher, Fred Ryan, nor the owner, Jeff Bezos, had any idea that this editorial was coming. I would be very surprised to learn that either of them agrees with the proposition that our principal stories on the NSA should not have been published. For sure I can tell you that this is not the position of the newsroom’s leadership or any reporter I know. Marty Baron, the executive editor, has said again and again how proud he is of the paper’s coverage of Ed Snowden and the NSA.

Readers are thus encouraged to examine and critique the model. If they disagree, they can modify it into a competing model with their own preferred assumptions, and use it to argue for their position. Model-driven material can be used as grounds for an informed debate about assumptions and tradeoffs.
Modeling leads naturally from the particular to the general. Instead of seeing an individual proposal as “right or wrong”, “bad or good”, people can see it as one point in a large space of possibilities. By exploring the model, they come to understand the landscape of that space, and are in a position to invent better ideas for all the proposals to come. Model-driven material can serve as a kind of enhanced imagination.

This is a part where my previous comments on data activism data journalism (see 1,2 & 3) and more plural computing environments for engagement of concerned citizens on the important issues of our time could intersect with Victor's discourse.

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of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.

Summary: After six months, I returned home with 400 pages of notes and began writing.<br>Something caught my eye: Below the title—Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite—were the words, “A Memoir.”<br>I immediately emailed my editor.<br>I later learned that memoirs in general sell better than investigative journalism.<br>I tried to push back.<br>“You only wish,” my agent laughed.<br>As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible.<br>The content of my work was what really mattered, I told myself.<br>The evangelical organization wanted to protect its close ties to the North Korean regime and the country’s future leaders.<br>The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that reporters should “avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.” It is hard to imagine any subject more vital to the public, or more impervious to open methods, than the secretive, nuclear North Korea; its violations against humanity, the United Nations has declared, “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” My greatest concern had been for my students, and I had followed well-established journalistic practices to ensure that they would not be harmed.<br>They called me “deeply dishonest” for going undercover.<br>My inbox began to be bombarded with messages from strangers: “Shame on you for putting good people in harm’s way for your gain.” One morning, I woke up to a Twitter message that read, simply: “Go fuck yourself.”<br>The ethics of her choice cast doubt on her reliability (another de facto peril of memoir), and her fear of discovery appears to have colored her impressions and descriptions with paranoia and distrust.”<br>My book was being dismissed for the very element that typically wins acclaim for narrative accounts of investigative journalism.<br>The backlash extended well beyond the media.<br>Why did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such a passionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships?<br>Orientalism reigns.<br>What struck me was not whether the review was positive, but the selection of the reviewer, a former TV columnist of Korean origin, whose only past book-length nonfiction was on South Korean popular culture.<br>As an Asian female, I find that people rarely assume I’m an investigative journalist; even after I tell them, they often forget.<br>Such gender discrimination can manifest either positively or negatively.<br>“If I had written a highly detailed book about being embedded with a troop,” she said, “the magnitude of the actual legwork would have been recognized.” Yet she also believes that great literary journalism combines the heart and the brain.<br>I would like to report that I took the reaction to my book in stride, that I weathered all the accusations and dismissals with patience, that I understood their causes and effects.<br>In immigrant ghettos, I learned that in my adoptive home, my skin was considered yellow, the color of the forsythia that had bloomed around my childhood home back in South Korea.<br>This is why I risked going into North Korea undercover: because I could not be consoled while the injustice of 25 million voiceless people trapped in a modern-day gulag remains part of our society.<br>Here I am telling my story to you, the reader, essentially to beg for acknowledgment: I am an investigative journalist, please take me seriously.<br>

HALL: For the most part, the rules were basically you have to collaborate. So what they did was create kind of an internal Facebook page - for a lack of a better reference - where we all created groups. We joined groups, and then we would post as we researched, so we had one system in which we did the research, another where we posted what we were finding. And what was remarkable about it - this was what - in the truest sense collaboration.
If I found something from India or Russia that I thought looked of interest, you know, you'd find somebody. You'd spend a little time looking at it. You'd go do an Internet search and see if you can find a footprint of this person anywhere. And then if you found that you'd post it. You might post some corresponding links. And particularly in some of the Latin American countries where resources are pretty slim and many of them are under threat, we are able to do a lot of the groundwork for them that then they could run with.

I wonder what this system is that allowed the journalists to collaborate in groups on the documents: sharing links, notes, etc. I didn't see it detailed in the writeup at The Source.

Perhaps it's Nuix, but it sounds like more than a system for ocr, indexing, etc.

Just an aside, it's kind of weird that the Source article doesn't even mention Nuix. Perhaps there were different teams working with different technologies?

TL;DR: Patricia Hswe and I wrote an article for American Libraries and the editors added some quotes from a vendor talking about their products without telling us. We asked them to fix it and they said no.

The article is "Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries", American Libraries Jan/Feb 2016, and the vendor is Gale/Cengage.

In my former job, I learned that much of what we think of as “news” is actual paid advertising. Segments on local TV, articles in newspapers and magazines, and even national news has paid portions that are not always called out as such. I’ve stopped trusting a lot of reporting because of knowing how much money is probably changing hands to make those segments come to life. Part of my job was scripting and writing articles that would then be presented in “editorial” fashion — that is, without any acknowledgement of our paid placement there.

I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.

This is the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that I've felt sympathy for the downfall of traditional journalism. Social media as a kind of echo chamber is really scary and almost sounds like a science fiction story.

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According to numbers from the American Journalism Review and the Pew Research Center, less than a third of U.S. newspapers have a reporter present at the statehouse (either full- or part-time) and almost no local television stations assign a reporter to state politics.

Net result: the public’s awareness of and access to the activities of state government is vanishing, at the same time that the decisions made by state-level actors are having greater effects on American lives.

The first step towards righting this asymmetry is access, and there’s a good idea out there you need to know about: State Civic Networks are state-based, non-profit, independent, nonpartisan, “citizen engagement” online centers, and they should exist in every state. (Think C-SPAN, but way better, and focusing on statehouses.)

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The explicit right to a free press it seems to me, though I’m no constitutional scholar, should translate today to an infrastructure not only for publishing information but for protecting those publishing, providing, or consuming it, as well as those financially supporting its publication. Just as the rights to speech, assembly, and petition should translate to online infrastructure in which discourse at all levels is protected and groups can meaningfully express their views (let alone the fourth amendment right to protection of your own information). With these essential rights, a democracy can function and use its mechanism of governance to create new rights and protections.

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the journalistic fetish for ‘impartiality’, which frequently means that anyone who has a strong opinion is ‘biased’, so ‘equal time’ is given to the ‘two sides’, without considering the possibility that if one side is a small minority who the experts are all strongly opposed to it might be because they are, you know, wrong.

In any reporting on a controversy in science or technology a journalists job is first and foremost to find out whether there’s overwhelming support for one side among experts and if there is to report that straightforwardly.

I don't know enough about bitcoin to have an opinion about this controversy. Regardless of that, this is a very good point. "Impartial" shouldn't mean giving equal credence and equal time to fringe viewpoints -- unless they are coming from some noteworthy experts with strong evidence.

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Petition President Obama to pardon alleged whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. He was convicted on the basis of exchanging emails and phone calls with a reporter, with no evidence of what was discussed? These conversations took place in 2002-2004, but they didn't decide to press charges until December 2010?

Megan Cossey<br>
Tips for fact checking your writing:<br>
* Verify every fact, no matter how insignificant.<br>
* Find out which sources are regarded the most highly in the field you are writing about.<br>
* If you can't verify it, delete it.

When it involves a person, email them the facts in question, and ask them whether they are correct.

Don't rely on Wikipedia articles alone, but the references used there may help.

Honestly, there are very few that don’t make me fear for humanity. But I would say some of the more evolved, entrenched conspiracy theories have been particularly mind-boggling to me – things like Jade Helm or Sandy Hook truthers. I mean, these people have constructed a truly nightmarish fantasyland for themselves. How do we address that? How do we continue to dialogue with them?

For me, what has become far more frustrating is a certain unwillingness to believe the debunk. I would see readers share links to the column on Facebook, telling their friends that a story or rumor they had posted wasn’t true. And the friends would come back with something like “you trust the Washington Post, that liberal rag???!?!?” It’s like a total unwillingness to engage with actual evidence.

A lot has changed. For one thing, hoax news has become industrialized on a scale that it never was before. There are dozens of websites, most less than 18 months old, that exist only to propagate real-looking fake news stories.
On top of that, as I say in the column, it feels like the tenor of fake news has changed. Where once these hoax stories were merely sensational or ridiculous – like your standard clickbait, basically – many now exist to exploit preconceived notions and biases. (Needless to say, that’s not a development that’s confined to fake-news sites or Internet hoaxers, either – it’s a problem we see across a wide swath of Internet media.)

Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.

Fake "news" sites and some bloggers have noticed that people will click links to controversial stories -- even if they are completely fabricated. So they make shit up, and idiots read it and share it.

Finding [Silk Road founder Ross] Ulbricht really boiled down to this: a bunch of Google searches done by an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).<br>
. . .<br>
His preferred tool: Google. Particularly the advanced search option that lets you focus in on a date range.<br>
. . .<br>
Alford couldn’t be at Ulbricht’s arrest, but he did receive a plaque. The NYT reports that Alford’s superiors had it inscribed with this quote from Sherlock Holmes: "The world is full of obvious things which nobody by chance ever observes."

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”
“To forget it!”
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

This is word for word from chapter 2 of A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story. Watson was shocked that Holmes claimed ignorance of the solar system.

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say
that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a
pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

What was the name of the camera Holmes used that might help Alzheimer’s patients

Based on this article, the camera is probably the SenseCam, and the journal might be Scientific American or Memory. I don't yet know which article he was referring to. Holmes says the article includes a picture of the Chinese restaurant.

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One of the central problems in these articles is the glaring lack of math. These personal choices and the environment they have set up for themselves tells us rather only the minuscule part of the story!

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Links, thoughts and research into using drones, UAVs or remotely piloted vehicles for journalism at the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications.

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The disaggregation of news in the Internet age has inverted this relationship, and made news outlets hypersensitive to the interests of their readers. This is a positive development. It’s good that the media covers stories that its constituents are interested in and want to read about. It’s good when news outlets are connected to the communities they serve.

I'm not so sure this is the case across the board. Our desires don't always serve us.

I sometimes do want gatekeepers to prevent me from hurting myself.

I don't know how to translate this into advice for the next generation of media, though.